When I was a kid in the 1980's I used to call the DJ and request songs A LOT. When I was a teen I used to call in to win contests. Now when I listen to a 'I<3Radio' station in the garage, its clear all the DJ segments are pre-recorded and everything is automated. Its all soundbites. Its all garbage. Its all advertisements. Its the same ~30 songs on rotation.
In the early 80's living in Brooklyn, I would tune into WKTU at 6:00PM every night just to hear
"Hello. This is Rosko. WKTU, New York." And then he'd segue into "Always and Forever" by Heatwave.
It was so scripted that at one point I started listening closely to see if it was recorded, but there were enough intonation and pacing changes that it was obvious he was doing it live.
Haven't lived in NYC in over 30 years but I miss that station.
Sure but there's so many internet and college radio stations out there. Even with mainstream consolidation I would find it surprising that there are less overall now than ever before.
I mean just look at boiler room and club culture in general. The amount of tastemaking DJs out there is pretty vast.
Internet DJ’s can’t feed off each other to produce regional music. It’s all one big blob available anywhere which drowns diversity in a sea of mediocrity.
College radio stations aren’t dramatically increasing to make up for the vast consolidation that removed something like 80-90% of radio DJ’s.
40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s flowed into each other but the stuff was all very distinct in a way that 2000’s vs 2010’s isn’t.
> It’s all one big blob available anywhere which drowns diversity in a sea of mediocrity.
I'm not interested in regional music or a regional scene.
The music on any given SomaFM station is not "a sea of mediocrity". It's generally excellent genre-specific stuff (old and new), and I love it (if I'm somewhat into the genre).
I can appreciate that others may not, but please don't over-generalize or assert that your preferences are the only ones out there.
I might just be out of touch, so show me the innovation.
Rap simply didn’t exist in the 60’s. What’s around today that wasn’t in the late 90’s? Not just minor evolution but new ideas. It’s been 25 years any other stretch of that length since 1900 had several radical new ideas.
All of those genres can be linked to one another and you can continue on down to extreme levels. Rock, punk, metal, funk, country, soul, and reggae alone barely touches on the diversity of string instrument based music. Is this a naming problem for you?
Every noise at once attempts to show the extremes to which music can be classified if you haven't seen it.
I don't see any signs that this evolution has ever stopped or will stop. Artists are obviously limited by physics, what sounds pleasant to us, the instruments that are available, and what is currently in fashion. That we'd have more unique music in a more isolated world seems like a pretty crazy claim to me.
There’s definitely relationships and cross pollination between genres, but that’s why the lack is concerning to me. It doesn’t directly matter to me if little new shows up, but indirectly I’ll be worse off.
> I don’t see any signs that this evaluation has ever stopped or will stop.
It wouldn’t be difficult to name something as new if there was a lot of meaningfully different new things to name.
Now I’m not saying things will be static, obviously we people will create. But I think it’s clear things have slowed down noticeably, and that means something really has been lost.
There are 33k broadcast stations in the USA [0], and
11k people employed as disc jockeys [1]
There were 12k broadcast stations in the 1980s [2]
Given we can assume little to no automation, or at least a DJ human making sure the equipment didn’t break, and 8 hour shifts, that suggests 36k people were employed as radio DJs in the 1980s if we only count their time on air, assuming a 24 hour broadcast. If we include their other duties, probably the total DJ time resource required would increase, and so would the number of employed DJs.
Nice analysis, but maybe still missing some things. e.g. it's not clear that "DJ" here is professional radio-DJs vs dancehall/wedding etc. which tend to be small single-person businesses in an entirely different function.
A good radio-DJ might be hired to fill a key block of time in a major metro. They may select to play a local band's new song during evening rush hour and suddenly 3 million new people know about it instantly moving them up the charts. They were just as much a part of the tastemaking stream as the labels and often provided interesting color commentary, local community info, places for meet and greets, upcoming concert info, and so on.
I live in a top-10 metro in the U.S. and I think it's very telling that the FM dial mostly plays pre-2000 music, with very little commentary by DJs if any between commercial breaks. They may as well just be a streaming internet feed pumped through an antenna. Some stations just play the same songs I remember from middle/high school decades ago and they aren't even advertising themselves as "classic" or "nostalgia" in any way.
Once the big consolidation events happened, it seems like the ability for popular music to really get ahold of the zeitgeist died with it and now tastemaking seems to be almost as much a function of push by labels and artists/influencers than a pull-and-present by people sitting in curation seats.
Music has become "flatter" in a sense which in theory is good. But if everything is unknown, it's much harder for utterly unknown geniuses with bad marketing skills to break through.
Yes, I agree with your statements. This was a quick attempt to roughly bound the problem. Comment I responded to was surprised that the field had shrunk, I feel this clearly shows it has shrunk at least by a factor of three, but yes, probably more anecdotally as I also live in a large metro area and the only live radio DJs are very niche or very syndicated.
> Music has become "flatter" in a sense which in theory is good. But if everything is unknown, it's much harder for utterly unknown geniuses with bad marketing skills to break through.
Man, I read stuff like this and it's just so far out of touch it blows my mind. Let me introduce you to the internet. You'll never run out of geniuses if you actually make an effort.
Right, but you aren't really acknowledging four realities:
1 - 90% of everything is crap.
2 - > if you actually make an effort
so now I have to be the curator! But I don't have time to sift through the 90% of crap. That's the point somebody else used to get paid to separate the creme from the top. You may have and unlimited amount of low value time to dedicate to listening to thousands of artists and tens of thousands of songs, but I certainly don't.
3 - even among curators, 90% of them aren't any good at it either, which is why, even if you shared your personal playlist of your very carefully curated list of songs that you spent 2000 hours last year carefully putting together, I'm more than likely to not like it myself. Being able to find good music, and then find an audience for your curation that is able to connect millions of people to those previous unknown is also a skill.
> You'll never run out of geniuses if you actually make an effort.
4 - then where are your multiple times a year new breakthrough artists that show up out of nowhere, dominate the charts for two weeks then are subsumed by newer geniuses? The charts are slammed full of artists who've been top of their game for 10-20 even 30 years now. It's the same old artists over and over, but that pales in comparison to the before times when you'd get something new and big and hit big every week.
I'm looking right now at the U.S. top-40 pop charts and there is on it this week -- no shit get this: Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, Charli XCX, Akon, Alphaville, Kendrick Lamar, Ariana Grande, and a few more that, let's face it have careers that are nearing drinking age in the U.S. Great artists all, but that used to be the age music shifted up-frequency to the oldies channel in the past.
If you disappeared from the planet in 2005 and showed back up today, you'd feel that the list was familiar. Where are your endless parade of geniuses on the top-40? We could have tight-beamed these old artists' entire discographies to Alpha Centauri and Back and they'd still be relevant and dominating the charts.
Honestly, it sounds like you don't appreciate music very much or have very limited taste.
Top 40, billboard, and the grammys aren't representative of contemporary music quality or the depth of talented musicians out there. It's not a secret and every musician knows it. Pearl Jam '96 grammys. It represents the consumers of music.
If you can't be bothered to watch or listen to some kexp live, audiotree live, tiny desk. Or listen to internet radio. Or read any of the numerous music publications. Or dig through related artists on a streaming platform. Then it's a problem with you the consumer of music, and makes you really no different than all the other people that make those top 40 charts what they are. It has no bearing or makes no comment on the overwhelming amount of good music we have today and how accessible it is.
Excellent work. Doesn't touch on the great change that the internet brought, which admittedly isn't clear from my original question :(
Wonder if those Zippia estimates include internet radio. Imagine it misses quite a bit given how difficult it would be to break down streamers on every platform.
If you are including streamers writ large, I would argue we are no longer really talking about the same thing. If we are talking about just internet radio, I would bet any paid, full time DJs there are intended to be included in the Zippia number.
There were essentially no video game DJs in the 1980s, though, so maybe what we seek from what media is just as responsible for the shift.
The original comment was referring to human tastemakers in contrast to algorithmically generated playlists.
It's this segment that I would have high doubts to have decreased even with the prevalence of infinite playlists.
Edit: Basically I don't agree with the premise that the way we consume music today is any less local or curated. There's just been a shift in the way we consume.
